Self-assuredness.

You've got to know yourself, man.
What "you've got to know yourself, man"?!
What a load of horseshit.
Let me tell you a simple truth. Nobody knows themselves. And what, on this solitary blue-green ball, would be the point of knowing yourself?
You don't think people get to where they are by the good graces of their self-awareness, do you? Really?
Fuck, man.  Who would want to anyway? Riddle me the fuck that one!
You think I or anyone else gets up in the morning and says, "Today is the day of my magnum opus.  My greatest song.  My greatest lyric.  My greatest good deed.  My greatest shot at philanthropy.  My greatest crime" (well, there are MANY who think this one).
Self belief is all, you scream, red-faced and all passion and piss and vinegar.
Well, my friend, tell that to ISIS, the Republicans, the Australian Liberal Party, fundamentalists and filibuster conservatives down through all time, the lesser poets who rail against a world filled with deafness, the lesser singers and musicians and artists who rail against a public filled with a certain war-weariness for the pedestrian and the thoughtless and the mechanised, the white collar criminals, the blue collar criminals, the criminals of the clergy, the public masturbators, the soul-wasted abstainers, the physically frail, the flagellants and the fucked-up.
See where self-belief has gotten THEM!
There's only one thing to do from my jaundiced perspective.
Stick around.
Just stick around.
Stay here on this little planet, bumbling through each day, stumbling over the wrong thing said and the wrong deed, the eons lost in procrastination and doubt, the hours and lifetimes lost in a lonely sepulcher just shy of being visible to the naked eye, stick around for the measured allowance of laughter and sex juice, and just be there for THE MOMENT.  Whatever your moment might be.
And then stick around for more until the moments spill - one into the next - until you can honestly say, "Now I have had a lifetime of moments."
And then stick around to reflect upon them, or crow and gloat about them.
And fuck up.
This is important.
Make lots and lots of mistakes.
Mistakes that you can say are only your own
because life has a funny way of making you aware that the more mistakes you make on your own, the less regrets you have as time passes.
Even if the resounding echoes of those mistakes haunt your guarded hours down through the years. No, my friend, I have no time for self-assuredness, self-confidence, self-belief.
Self love, certainly.  No one I know past the age of puberty seems to be exempt from that one.
But as for the pinnacles and zeniths and victories and triumphs, I must let them come as they will, if I'm to make any sense of them at all.
And I'd advise you to do the same, if you want to enjoy your life.
Or perhaps you really do know what you want out of life.  In which case, I am of absolutely no use to you.
P.S. We're moving back to Melbourne.

Whiskey Girl

Dick Wagner.

I learned over the weekend that I lost another longstanding hero back in July besides Brett Jacobson. When I was a kid learning guitar, I used to catch the bus into the city and go to Palings Music on Pitt Street. I'd slink upstairs to the sheet music section and look at Elvis Costello and Clash and Alice Cooper songbooks. The latter were (and remain) a brilliant source of unique voicings and amazing compositions, primarily because Cooper's guitarist at the time was Dick Wagner. Wagner also happened to be a superb composer and brilliant lyricist (he wrote Cooper's 'Only Women Bleed' which Cooper only marginally altered). And it was his chords that made it to the books.
I taught myself to mnemonically remember the strange shapes that Wagner played until finally I could play most of the stuff between Welcome to my Nightmare up until about DaDa. The amount of store employees who used to come and watch this gawpy kid standing there, eyes closed and frowning furiously trying to memorise those shapes, only to have me buy nothing (I seriously couldn't afford those books hence the memory thing). Then I'd race home and play my cheapy nylon stringed guitar until they sounded vaguely like the songs.

That's all I wanted to say on it.

But if you are a budding guitarist or you're a player of some experience, or perhaps you've just hit a plateau with your technique, then I urge you to seek out those original Alice Cooper songbooks and hear and learn the magic of Dick Wager's arrangements.

I never wrote those songs.

Scribbles from Blayney.

Today was the Day of the Snake and Spider.
Wedged between the cattle paddocks and the rock quarry is a small block of land I'd called Copperhead Alley. So named because I'd seen a one meter Copperhead snake lazing on the hot road.
Today we had to spend some time pottering around this particular block and I had no idea how portentous my quip would be. Within an hour, five of us almost stepped on Copperheads, as well as a big Red Belly and a large Brown snake. And then there was the big old gum tree in the middle of it all, riddled with Tree Funnelwebs.
Tonight, after the storm, only the lingering fragrance of petrichor and cattle piss remains.
But tomorrow...

    ******

Dogfights the likes of which I never thought I'd see, today. A beautiful big falcon or kite - soft pearlescent bronze in the afternoon light. It must have been close to twenty inches in full span. Took out the raven first. Followed by some noisy miners, two galahs and a crimson rosella that happened to get caught in the crossfire.
Fuck not with the falcon, I did learn.

     *****

We were going to do so much this year.
This year of your 50th birthday.
But we started the thing as nearly broken and dispirited souls and didn't get too much past that before you left this world.
We laughed about taking a '68 Riviera Targa or a '71 Camaro, flying in to LAX and heading wherever the fuck we wanted, leaving our women and loved ones behind as we laughingly sought out the ghosts of our corrupted and imaginary youth.
So, Jake, this night I'm hoping against hope that I will close my eyes in this little cabin in this little town and I will dream big dreams.
Of desert mesas and movie stars. Of rednecks and socialites. Of friendly, slow-drawl farmers and car salesmen with unnaturally white smiles. Of racists northern or southern whose whole outlook is transformed by the off the cuff remarks from us two strange antipodeans. Of shy and wary bible belt folk stuck between their combine harvesters and their Millers Lite. Of musicians who can't play enough notes or tragically too many with any degree of proficiency, or more importantly, love. Of the learned and the unlearned from Van Nuys all the way over and up to the coast of Maine. Of the smile, the leg or the fading tattoo that once meant something to someone, somewhere between Portland and Pensacola. Of the hapless who find fortune and the paragons who seek ruin. Of rain-soaked redwoods and rocket ships. And may the dream be pleasurably slow. All the hours in this world, if you please.
Tonight I hope you come into my dreams and back into my life that we might share some careless laughter just this one more time.